


Perchance to Dream

by kerlin



Category: Farscape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-03
Updated: 2010-09-03
Packaged: 2017-10-11 10:36:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/111502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are so very, very alone, and you can't even tell anyone that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perchance to Dream

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to ScaperRed for the beta

“Sun.” His voice startles you out of your thoughts, and you stiffen against the involuntary jump that your instincts demand of you. You turn to face him, projecting a disinterested air.

His grip on your upper arm takes you by surprise, and you don’t even think to struggle as he presses you up against the wall of the deserted hallway. You’d argued with Talyn over some trivial thing, and had gone to work off your excess energy in the simulator at an arn that promised it would be just you and the machine, the way you like it.

Thick fingers dig into your muscle, and the acidity of his raslak-tinted breath makes your eyes water. You force yourself to relax, to prove to him that no matter how unexpected his attack may have been, he doesn’t have the upper hand. Reaching deep down inside, you pull the ice up to encase you, the familiar cold dulling your treacherous emotions and frosting your gaze as you stare blankly back at him.

This is not an unfamiliar occasion, a drunken grope in a back corridor, but it’s never unsettled you quite this much before. Your emotions were already running high before the simulator, and they threaten to bubble over now, batting wildly against the frozen borders you’ve placed around them.

“Can I help you, Sub-Officer?” Your voice sounds distant and tinny, as if you’re hearing it from metras away. He laughs, short barks that echo in your ears gratingly, and presses himself up against you. You turn your head away from him and fix your eyes on the indented handle of a maintenance panel. It’s late in the night cycle, and which means that the lights are toned down, and the shadows throw the handle into stark relief.

“You know you can.” His other hand is busy trying to fasten itself drunkenly on the zipper to your off-duty leathers, and it’s at that point that you let your emotions get the better of you. In one wild buck you shove at him, but his mass is much greater than yours and you accomplish nothing more than putting a hot gleam of fury into his eyes along with the lust. He backhands you across the cheek in one smooth motion and your head rebounds against the wall. Blood drips down from your nose to coat your swollen lips as you realize you’ve given yourself away.

Sub-Officer Tarkan prefers his women struggling. You’ve known that for cycles, since you first boarded this command carrier. You’ve never been afraid of him because you’d never cared enough to be afraid of him, but now, since your hesitant encounters with Talyn, your emotions have been nearer the surface. Reacting to him like that only served to encourage him.

He has somehow managed to work your zipper halfway down, and panic grips you as you throw all your energy into a frenzied twisting. His fingers dig nearly to the bone on your arm, and casually he buries his fist in your stomach, sending all the air out of your lungs in a painful whoosh even as he continues upward to slap you, back and forth until your vision is blurry and the only thing keeping you standing is his body still pinning yours against the wall.

Bile rushes up in your throat as you try desperately to breathe or even gain some sort of focus in your vision. Tarkan is a huge man, and while you’ve trained against your peers on the practice mat, your mind was always following the curve of a Prowler through space, not the gross physicality of hand to hand combat. You try to swallow and breathe at the same time and choke spastically. Dimly, you are aware that he has succeeded in working your leathers a few inches down your hips.

“Sub-Officer Tarkan, are you or are you not listed as being on-duty in a quarter arn?”

He freezes as you both recognize the authoritative voice ringing out. Slowly, pressure leaks out of his grip on your arm, and he steps away. You lock your knees so that you don’t collapse as his feet and instead sink against the wall, the cold of the metal biting into the skin of your lower back where the leathers have been pulled down to below your shirt.

“Sir.” Tarkan comes to attention sloppily. Not even a drunken Peacekeeper is foolish enough to blatantly disregard a question from a senior officer. “Yes, sir.” He manages to walk in a more or less straight line down the hallway and disappears around a corner.

Fine tremors begin to wrack your body and you reach deep inside yourself to wrap your core in ice once again, and you still your muscles even as Talyn approaches and reaches out a hand.

You tug your leathers back up and zipper them again, the action mechanical and comforting in its simplicity. Emotions led you to this. Emotions made you prey, made you vulnerable in the Peacekeeper world. It shouldn’t have mattered, what Tarkan wanted to do with you.

And you are paying for that weakness a thousandfold, in the bruises on your arm and patterned across your stomach, in the blood that still flows freely, dripping down your chin. You lick swollen, bloody lips with a tongue that at some point you bit clean through, and you bat away his hand.

With your other hand, you push off from the wall and carefully place one foot in front of the other as you leave.

~*~

It's another weeken before Talyn makes a move in your general direction, and when he does you reject him out of hand, pushing the bottle of fellip nectar back across the table and leaving to go back to the simulator.

The tech attendant at the simulator doesn't say anything to you, merely points toward the electronic board listing scores and sim arns. You've already used up your alloted time for the weeken and defeated, you return to the barracks.

You lie on your back, arms crossed behind your head, and stare up at the ceiling above your bunk. Eventually the rest of the regiment returns, one by one taking to their bunks to sleep dreamlessly.

You never dreamed before, either, but recently fantasies have begun to stalk your sleep, and you've woken many mornings with a lingering sense of something more, something you only explored during the time you spent oblivious to reality.

Last night, you woke when the rest of the regiment was still sound asleep, your mouth dry and your blankets drenched with sweat. You'd relived the incident with Tarkan and in your dream Talyn hadn't come to stop him. He'd forced himself on you there in the hall and somehow the worst part of it all was that you'd cared.

But Talyn had come. He had stopped Tarkan instead of giving an encouraging smirk, and had chased away your demons. And you'd pushed him away.

You feel so alone it frightens you. Always before, you had lived your life alone, apart from everyone else because you'd thought yourself better, smarter, stronger, faster. You had reveled in the loneliness, paying homage to the way it shaped you, the way it propelled your career forward. You'd been sure to make Officer rank within a few monens.

But now the loneliness saps away at your resolve and you close your eyes tightly, trying to ignore the whispering breaths of the sleeping pilots around you. So many men and women, perfect dreamless Peacekeeper commandos, who fight and recreate and sleep and defecate according to a pattern that has been drilled into them since birth, since before birth, back countless generations.

There's not a single one of them that would understand what you are thinking right now, because they don't have the context for it. Maybe, maybe if at least one of them were planet-born, but there are fewer and fewer planet-borns in the ranks now, because they are so unpredictable. You are so very, very alone and you can't even tell anyone that.

You study the backs of your eyelids and lights and colors flash in front of your eyes. You try to concentrate on those, losing yourself in the abstract and dragging your mind away from its treasonous thoughts.

But the sparks coalesce into a pair of mocking gray eyes and in the pattern of the breathing around you it almost seems as if you hear the intonation of his voice telling you about a green field patterned with flowers, and a blue sky overhead.

In one smooth motion you flip yourself over the side of the bed and land lightly on your feet, three bunks down. There are no rules against leaving barracks, not like when you were younger. The Peacekeepers trust in their indoctrination to keep their soldiers to an inbred schedule, mapped out in their DNA and reinforced by instructor's backhand at an early age.

It only takes a few microts to pull on your off-duty leathers and snap your boots tight, the close feel of the leather buoying your thoughts in reality. Even off-duty clothes have the feel of a uniform, and you've always been able to function better when slipping into the role of anonymous Prowler pilot.

Talyn is still awake, and you stand motionless at the door for a microt, furious that you knew he was awake even before you sounded the door charm. He stands, silhouetted in the nighttime lighting of his quarters, and then moves aside for you to enter.

He is only one man as compared to the two dozen other barrack mates you just left, but when the door shuts your feeling of loneliness evaporates as if it had never been.

"I don't want this," you blurt out, and then snap your mouth shut in shock. It's as if someone else said those words, and you a prisoner to your own emotions. All the discipline and control you achieved by snapping your boots tight has evaporated and you are left alone, bare to him as you were from the moment you first met.

He doesn't say anything and you feel every microt of your nineteen cycles, so young, so inexperienced, and completely unable to control the words that continue to spill out of you.

"I shouldn't care about this. I shouldn't care about Tarkan, and about dreaming, and about being lonely." Each words is a blow, rolling off your tongue and aimed at him, but amazingly, unsettlingly, he doesn't care. He just continues to look at you.

Tears scald the back of your eyes and you heave in a shuddering breath. You want more than anything to be able to move, to strike at him and remove him from your life, to run all the way back to your bunk and sleep in rhythm with the other pilots. You want to feel the shudder of a Prowler around you as you push all of its systems into the red on a tight curve to swing back around for another strafing run.

"Frell you, Talyn Lyczac." The words are almost mumbled and you will never be sure if he even hears them.

He reaches for you and you let him wrap his arm around your shoulders and twine his fingers through your hair. Your whisper brokenly for him not to touch you but the words are meaningless and you both know it.

He rests his cheek against the top of your head and his warmth spreads through your body. You shudder again, but this time it loosens your body instead of tightening it, and your head fits into a space against his collarbone so easily that the loneliness is gone as if it never existed.

"This doesn't solve anything," he says, his first words since you entered his quarters. "There are no easy answers, Xhalax. There are only steps along a journey."

"You never make any sense," you mumble irritably against his chest because for you the word journey only means a mission flight path. But the tone of his voice describes a comforting future, and his words about solving problems have been taken straight from your heart. You don't think you'll ever be comfortable both in either world that you can see, but maybe for a time you can exist in both of them.

His hands grip your face and his thumb strokes along your cheekbone. He is smiling widely and he kisses your forehead chastely and then tucks you in close to him again.

"I know I don't," he says, and for just a microt he sounds as lost as you just felt. "But I think you understand it, in part, and that makes you different from anyone else I've met."


End file.
